Page 44 of Witch and Tell

Again, giving him space to fill the void was a fail. “If she’d known what? Ian, stop horsing around. Where have you been, and why?” I leaned forward and lobbed my biggest bomb. “Did you kill Tyrone Beaudrie?”

The shock on Ian’s face was real. He had no idea Tyrone was dead. Of course, I wasn’t completely sure, either.

“Who’s Tyrone Beaudrie?” he said.

Now I was the flummoxed one. In the distance, a lawn mower started up. Outside, the world rolled on with its routines of grass cutting, dinner prep, and children playing. Inside, tangled threads of fear and murder waited to be put straight. Ian’s scar whitened in the light, then faded back to pale pink as he turned his head.

“Let’s start at the beginning,” I said. “A week and a half ago, you dropped out of sight. When construction started at the Empress.” Or was that a coincidence?

His nod confirmed that I was on target so far. To me, Ian had always appeared reserved, although I caught hints of a boyish vulnerability. Clearly, Lalena did, too, or she wouldn’t be so smitten with him. He opened up now. Whether it was design or simply exhaustion, I didn’t know.

“You want the beginning? Here’s the beginning.” He examined the hand resting on the wheel of his chair, then raised his eyes to mine. “I grew up in a rough neighborhood in Baltimore, and I fell in with the wrong crowd.”

“As happens,” I said, hoping this would encourage him further.

“My home life was rough. My mother was gone, and Dad wasn’t around much, either. I guess I was looking for family.”

Despite myself, my heart softened. “I see.”

He looked away. “Me and a few other kids worked for a gang who ran a protection racket.”

“A protection racket?”

“Some older men had set it up. They told businesses in the neighborhood they had to pay a monthly fee, or they’d find their stores vandalized. You know, windows broken, goods stolen—things like that. My role was to collect payments and, when needed, break a few windows.” He drummed his fingers on the arm of his wheelchair. “I’m not proud of it. This was before my injury, of course.”

I didn’t want to interrupt his narrative, so I simply nodded.

“One of the shop owners had a used bookstore. He was different from the rest. Other business owners either paid us quickly without making eye contact, or they were openly hostile.” Ian snorted. “Not that I blamed them. But Mr. Ehrenberg was different. When he saw me looking at a stack of books on his counter, he showed one to me. It had engravings of old ships.” Ian’s voice sounded faraway now, lost in a long-ago memory.

I understood that love of books. I knew the wonder of discovering that a flat bundle of bound paper could reveal whole worlds teeming with sights, sounds, and emotion. It still thrilled me.

“Mr. Ehrenberg turned my life around. He made me see that so much more was possible than a life of being a stoolie in someone’s protection racket. I couldn’t thank him enough. I….”

Again, the fading out. Then I understood. “He’s not . . . he’s passed, hasn’t he?”

“Yes. He died.” Ian’s voice raised in pitch. “Apparently my bosses thought he should pay a bit more, and when he demurred, they trashed his shop. He had a heart attack. Died.”

“They killed him.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Indirectly,” Ian said. “His heart couldn’t stand the strain.”

There was more to this story. This time, my patience paid off.

“I couldn’t stick around,” Ian said. “I had to get out of there.”

“You couldn’t just quit?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I might have been able to quit, maybe, but Mr. Ehrenberg’s money had disappeared. I suspect my boss stole it. To hide it from the others, he accused me.”

“You didn’t take it,” I said with certainty.

“Steal from Mr. Ehrenberg? I couldn’t.” Ian’s voice was incredulous. He held up a hand before I could protest that this was, in fact, what he’d been doing all along, although in someone else’s name. “I know what you’re going to say. After I left, I sent money to his widow whenever I could. Now she’s gone, too.”

“You had to leave town.”

“Yes. I changed my name and moved across the country. This was years ago. The love of books Mr. Ehrenberg had instilled in me grew, and I ended up buying and selling them, just as he did, but without a storefront. Until I found the This-N-That.”

It started to come together now. “When the construction crew came to town, you saw one of your old gang.” Wilfred must be everyone’s bolt-hole, including Tyrone Beaudrie’s, an alias, not the name under which Ian had known him. I remembered his talk of a new life.